Footnotes

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Sunday, October 01, 2006

My Curb was sort of a ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ tribute, only instead of an albatross Larry was saddled with a bottle of his own urine he couldn’t seem to get rid of. In the episode, ‘Seinfeld’ is approaching a new syndication cycle and since the numbers are down, it's decided by Castlerock executives that they will have a ‘Seinfeld convention.’ Since Jerry is in Stuttgart at Porsche camp, and the cast members are pissed about their DVD deals, it’s on Larry to host the thing.

He and Cheryl wound up getting drunk with Julia Louis Dreyfuss and Brad Hall and swapping partners. Larry comes in his pants as soon as he touches Julia’s tit, and they spend the rest of the evening listening as Brad fuck Larry’s wife from hell to breakfast upstairs. For the rest of the episode, Larry is after Julia for a ‘make-good’ fuck, since he feels shortchanged. He is eventually confronted in the locker room of the country club by Brad Hall, who he sees is hung like a bull elephant.

At the convention, Larry manages to offend every Seinfeld fan in attendance, basically calling them losers that make him sorry for doing the show in the first place. To add to his misery, Cheryl goes up to Julia and Brad’s suite while he is stuck on the floor of the convention, and Brad’s clearly nut-slapping them both. I forget how the bottle of piss thing played out, but it was woven really well.

Our only misstep season was when I involved myself with the production wing of my management company, who led me into an old con called an ‘if-come deal.’ This sounds very much like a transaction made in public men’s rooms, and not without very good reason.

Look, I realize that the perceived need for an agent is written into the DNA of the hopeful writer, and despite anything I may say, as-yet unrecognized writers will fervently look to agents to change their lot. I am honestly hopeful your experience will be different than mine have been time and time again. But when the opportunity does arise, as it will if you continue to work hard on your own behalf, pursue it with these points in mind:

Keep in mind at all times when dealing with an agent that they are charming fucks when they need to be. Their assistants’ nervous twitches and battered housewife-attention to detail should clue you in that this is infrequently the case when they don't need to be.

So when they are in knock-you-sockless charming mode it is difficult to not believe that clean living has finally inclined the good Lord to gift you with the attention of someone who sees you for the enormously talented individual you undoubtedly are in a way that no one else, save loved ones and other obligated people in your social circle, has managed not to somehow miss. They see the great things ahead for you that you have nutured visions of in your sheltered secret heart. They seem to marvel that you don't realize quite how great you are! They have great plans for you that are only vaguely outlined but seem to be foreshadowed with all the glories dreamt of by man; these plans are best kept to themselves for the time being anyway, as you're an Artist, and artists needn't worry about such things. Leave it all to them! You just need to create, you genius, you golden god you. You've just received the greatest blowjob your ego has ever had. Remember, though, that you've gotten it from a professional, and like an expert performance of same in a literal sense by a prostitute, it's naive to confuse actual feeling has played any part in this servicing, or that you mean any more as a person to them than you do to the prostitute coldly wiping your semen from her chin once the performance is over. It's just business; an act they've all been through so many times before that they're propelled through it almost by unconscious muscle-memory alone--but aided, of course, by the feeling of power they get from their unerring ability to play you like a Fisher Price xylophone at will and obscure their detachment as they watch you fall in love with their words, and look at them like long-awaited saviors. Never let people tell you that agents are people who aren't talented enough to be in show business; an agency's staff is not infrequently made up of better actors than are found on its talent roster.

Unrepresented writers generally take this kind of whinging and grousing about agents as an off-putting indulgence on the part of someone who is lucky enough to have one. They hear the complaints, but they believe that if they got an agent, their lives would change hugely for the better. How I envy their belief in the Agent's powers of deliverance! The truth is, it's so difficult to get an agent when you have no representation that it really should mean more to have one when you've finally got one. It should mean all the things you hope it will. It doesn’t.